The Adventures of Harry Richmond. Complete. George Meredith
him as much fair play as one who holds a balance. Squire Gregory doubted it, and sipped and kept his nose at his wineglass, crabbedly repeating his doubts of it. The captain then remarked, that doubting it, his conscience permitted him to use stratagems, though he, the captain, not doubting it, had no such permission.
‘I count I run away with her every night of my life,’ said Squire Gregory. ‘Nothing comes of it but empty bottles.’
‘Court her, serenade her,’ said the captain; ‘blockade the port, lay siege to the citadel. I’d give a year of service for your chances, Greg. Half a word from her, and you have your horses ready.’
‘She’s past po’chaises,’ Squire Gregory sighed.
‘She’s to be won by a bold stroke, brother Greg.’
‘Oh, Lord, no! She’s past po’chaises.’
‘Humph! it’s come to be half-bottle, half-beauty, with your worship, Greg, I suspect.’
‘No. I tell you, William, she’s got her mind on that fellow. You can’t po’chay her.’
‘After he jilted her for her sister? Wrong, Greg, wrong. You are muddled. She has a fright about matrimony—a common thing at her age, I am told. Where’s the man?’
‘In the Bench, of course. Where’d you have him?’
‘I, sir? If I knew my worst enemy to be there, I’d send him six dozen of the best in my cellar.’
Temple shot a walnut at me. I pretended to be meditating carelessly, and I had the heat and roar of a conflagration round my head.
Presently the captain said, ‘Are you sure the man’s in the Bench?’
‘Cock,’ Squire Gregory replied.
‘He had money from his wife.’
‘And he had the wheels to make it go.’ Here they whispered in earnest.
‘Oh, the Billings were as rich as the Belthams,’ said the captain, aloud.
‘Pretty nigh, William.’
‘That’s our curse, Greg. Money settled on their male issue, and money in hand; by the Lord! we’ve always had the look of a pair of highwaymen lurking for purses, when it was the woman, the woman, penniless, naked, mean, destitute; nothing but the woman we wanted. And there was one apiece for us. Greg, old boy, when will the old county show such another couple of Beauties! Greg, sir, you’re not half a man, or you’d have carried her, with your opportunities. The fellow’s in the Bench, you say? How are you cocksure of that, Mr. Greg?’
‘Company,’ was the answer; and the captain turned to Temple and me, apologizing profusely for talking over family matters with his brother after a separation of three years. I had guessed but hastily at the subject of their conversation until they mentioned the Billings, the family of my maternal grandmother. The name was like a tongue of fire shooting up in a cloud of smoke: I saw at once that the man in the Bench must be my father, though what the Bench was exactly, and where it was, I had no idea, and as I was left to imagination I became, as usual, childish in my notions, and brooded upon thoughts of the Man in the Iron Mask; things I dared not breathe to Temple, of whose manly sense I stood in awe when under these distracting influences.
‘Remember our feast in the combe?’ I sang across the table to him.
‘Never forget it!’ said he; and we repeated the tale of the goose at Rippenger’s school to our entertainers, making them laugh.
‘And next morning Richie ran off with a gipsy girl,’ said Temple; and I composed a narrative of my wanderings with Kiomi, much more amusing than the real one. The captain vowed he would like to have us both on board his ship, but that times were too bad for him to offer us a prospect of promotion. ‘Spin round the decanters,’ said he; ‘now’s the hour for them to go like a humming-top, and each man lend a hand: whip hard, my lads. It’s once in three years, hurrah! and the cause is a cruel woman. Toast her; but no name. Here’s to the nameless Fair! For it’s not my intention to marry, says she, and, ma’am, I’m a man of honour or I’d catch you tight, my nut-brown maid, and clap you into a cage, fal-lal, like a squirrel; to trot the wheel of mat-trimony. Shame to the first man down!’
‘That won’t be I,’ said Temple.
‘Be me, sir, me,’ the captain corrected his grammar.
‘Pardon me, Captain Bulsted; the verb “To be” governs the nominative case in our climate,’ said Temple.
‘Then I’m nominative hic… I say, sir, I’m in the tropics, Mr. Tem … Mr. Tempus. Point of honour, not forget a man’s name. Rippenger, your schoolmaster? Mr. Rippenger, you’ve knocked some knowledge into this young gentleman.’ Temple and I took counsel together hastily; we cried in a breath: ‘Here ‘s to Julia Rippenger, the prettiest, nicest girl living!’ and we drank to her.
‘Julia!’ the captain echoed us. ‘I join your toast, gentlemen. Mr. Richmond, Mr. Tempus-Julia! By all that’s holy, she floats a sinking ship! Julia consoles me for the fairest, cruellest woman alive. A rough sailor, Julia! at your feet.’
The captain fell commendably forward. Squire Gregory had already dropped. Temple and I tried to meet, but did not accomplish it till next morning at breakfast. A couple of footmen carried us each upstairs in turn, as if they were removing furniture.
Out of this strange evening came my discovery of my father, and the captain’s winning of a wife.
CHAPTER X. AN EXPEDITION
I wondered audibly where the Bench was when Temple and I sat together alone at Squire Gregory’s breakfast-table next morning, very thirsty for tea. He said it was a place in London, but did not add the sort of place, only that I should soon be coming to London with him; and I remarked, ‘Shall I?’ and smiled at him, as if in a fit of careless affection. Then he talked runningly of the theatres and pantomimes and London’s charms.
The fear I had of this Bench made me passingly conscious of Temple’s delicacy in not repeating its name, though why I feared it there was nothing to tell me. I must have dreamed of it just before waking, and I burned for reasonable information concerning it. Temple respected my father too much to speak out the extent of his knowledge on the subject, so we drank our tea with the grandeur of London for our theme, where, Temple assured me, you never had a headache after a carouse overnight: a communication that led me to think the country a far less favourable place of abode for gentlemen. We quitted the house without seeing our host or the captain, and greatly admired by the footmen, the maids, and the grooms for having drunk their masters under the table, which it could not be doubted that we had done, as Temple modestly observed while we sauntered off the grounds under the eyes of the establishment. We had done it fairly, too, with none of those Jack the Giant-Killer tricks my grandfather accused us of.
The squire would not, and he could not, believe our story until he heard the confession from the mouth of the captain. After that he said we were men and heroes, and he tipped us both, much to Janet Ilchester’s advantage, for the squire was a royal giver, and Temple’s money had already begun to take the same road as mine.
Temple, in fact, was falling desperately in love; for this reason he shrank from quitting Riversley. I perceived it as clearly as a thing seen through a windowpane. He was always meditating upon dogs, and what might be the price of this dog or that, and whether lapdogs were good travellers. The fashionable value of pugs filled him with a sort of despair. ‘My goodness!’ he used an exclamation more suitable to women, ‘forty or fifty pounds you say one costs, Richie?’
I pretended to estimate the probable cost of one. ‘Yes, about that; but I’ll buy you one, one day or other, Temple.’
The dear little fellow coloured hot; he was too much in earnest to laugh at the absurdity of his being supposed to want a pug for himself, and walked round me, throwing himself into attitudes with shrugs and loud breathings. ‘I don’t… don’t think that I… I care for nothing but Newfoundlands and mastiffs,’ said he. He went on shrugging and kicking up his heels.
‘Girls like pugs,’